I was supposed to run my TS&R Jade game this afternoon, but it's the end of semester/holiday season, so plans fell apart. It happens. Next week, we have family plans, the weekend after that is Christmas, and New Years the week after that. So probably no more D&D play until January. Bummer.
But I'm working on the next game for my Star Wars campaign. As usual, I'm having a hard time coming up with things for this game for two reasons.
One, in order to keep the Star Wars feel of the game, the books recommend more railroad game play. Have a plot. Give the players their goal. Let them loose. And really, the players seem to enjoy that. They're not all up for self-directed, self-motivated play. But I try to add as much freedom into the scenarios as possible, dictating the set-up but not the resolution. But it doesn't feel right forcing them into these set-ups sometimes.
Two, if they were up for self-motivated play, I'd feed out of my depth. I've seen all the movies, read some comics/novels (most of the comics I've read have been fine, the novels I've tried were trash), watched the Disney+ shows and most of the animated stuff, played various Star Wars video games, etc. I've got pretty good knowledge of the Star Wars universe (and Wookieepedia is just a search away). But I still feel daunted by just letting the players loose in a galaxy with thousands of planets. That's an awful lot to keep track of, and that's even if they only ever visit the main planets from the movies (and I keep sending them to other planets partly to allow myself room to improvise when I need to).
But despite the misgivings I have about the way I'm running the campaign (I want a more open, player-directed game, but feel hesitant to throw the gates wide open because of all the work that would give me), it's going well. We play maybe once a month or every other month, whenever I've got some interesting set-up prepared.
A few sessions back, the party escorted the Hutt princess Marjon (daughter of their sorta patron, Bumpomo) to Coruscant for a fancy high society ball. When the ball got attacked by Zygerian slavers, one of the two Jedi in the party was using the Force. Right in Palpatine's back yard. So when they went back to doing smuggling/salvaging/whatever for the Hutt, a Sith Inquisitor started tracking them down. They had an encounter and forced the Inquisitor to flee. Later, the Imperials moved in on the Hutt planet called Dandoran, they helped Bumpomo the Hutt flee to Nal Hutta.
On Nal Hutta, they racked up a lot of charges and fees (Hutts be Hutts, after all), and to square the debt, were sent to salvage an old Banking Clan ship that was lost in the Clone Wars. After some hijinx, they located the ship, and started exploring/looting it. But the Inquisitor, his Death Troopers, and some bounty hunters had followed them, and in the end, the party managed to defeat them all. And among the money and minerals and other resources on the ship, they found some beskar (Mandalorian steel).
So now I'm working on the next adventure. How will the party's Mandalorian PC contact some other Mandos to get that beskar turned into better armor? I had an idea, but it would have required me to either run a short 30 minute session to get them to the big decision point, then I'd have to stop to prep based on their choice, or else prep two or three very different scenarios trying to anticipate their likely choices.
I didn't want to run a short little session like that considering how infrequently we play, but thankfully, I figured out the idea for how to add more layers to the "30 minutes" that will stretch it out to a full session of 2-3 hours, thanks to a brief chat with my son (who plays the Mandalorian). So things are going well there.
I probably won't get to run D&D until next month, but I'll likely have this Star Wars adventure ready pretty quickly.
